When I was a quality manager in my earlier job in an MNC (Multi-National Company), a lot of my team members were quite misinformed about the “Power of Verification” in a software development process. I went through a lot of reflection around my own experience working on multiple projects related to doing “software verification” exercises. I gained profound understanding of how organizations can gain immense benefit just by understanding the true power of this activity (if done correctly). For the uninitiated, let me give a brief understanding about what “Verification” means. As part of ensuring quality of any software, the whole development process can be split into 2 simple parts – Verification & Validation To put this simply, “Verification” is always done before software code is developed & “Validation” is always done post development of software code. A “Verification” activity means, doing detailed analysis and reviews for – Customer Requirements Software Architectur
A decade back, when I was working on a huge enterprise program (with multiple projects) along with a big team (of close to 300 people), we were a group of managers who were evaluated and pushed by the senior management to “proactively” deal with issues and to work on finding new solutions. I used to think of how - we can become “proactive”, when we were already focusing our efforts on fighting our daily “fires” or urgencies of our project work. When I delved deeper into our daily work habits, it struck me that till the time we are not excited about “getting things done”, the willingness to explore more out of our comfort zone just doesn’t happen. The innate human behaviour is to follow a routine and establish a comfort zone over a period. The 1st factor – “an external stimulus” can upset us and force us to think or act out of our comfort zone. The 2nd factor that can make us “move” out of our comfort zones is about having an excitement of a future or coming up with a vision th